Saturday, June 18, 2016

Corbyn and Sanders: Reformism and Social Imperialism

We don’t suppose Jeremy Corbyn had to pay much of a political price
for the flap caused by former London mayor Ken Livingstone, but it does
highlight the creepy racist thinking of British ruling class circles
that even the Labour Party “left” has entered into. Along with the
anti-Jewish sentiments one finds under their carpet, the dirty open
secret is how they support imperialist wars maintaining the “special
relationship” between Britain and the U.S.A. Many reformists in the
U.S. point to the rise of Corbyn and liken this to the mass support for
the Democrat Bernie Sanders.

We think there is more identity here
between these two than the Sanders supporters would want to acknowledge.
These two are social imperialists. What we mean by that is the
generation of an illusion of championing a socialist “political
revolution” by means of bourgeois electoral contests, while in fact
supporting imperialist military, investment and political projects aimed
expressly at crushing anti-imperialist revolts by workers and peasants
overseas. We will discuss some of the economic theory supporting this
political identity further below.

While the vanguard of the Mexican-American population, overwhelmingly
working class, blocks and disrupts Donald Trump’s ‘know-nothing’
rallies, the true “Carlton Cliquers” of the SWP seek to recruit Trump
supporters, hawking their press and Pathfinder literature with ‘tables’
at Trump events. One variety of Barnesites-without-Barnes rallies to the
reformist North Star e-magazine. In its latest number, Louis Proyect
retails a reformist wet-dream where Bernie Sanders can form an
independent third party that runs for offices and presumably president
in 2020 to effect their “political revolution.”[1]

We can assume this means that Bernie’s politics will get a branding as
“progressive” for some supporters and “socialist” for others. For
unrepentant Barnesite-of-old Proyect, such a party would be all about
defense of his own “middle class.” Proyect dreams of the social
imperialist past, the 1932-72 era spanning the New Deal to the end of
the Bretton Woods Agreement. We in the labor movement have had to deal
with the pro-imperialist bureaucracy of the AFL-CIO and Change to Win
federations from the Meany era down to the Trumka-Hillary crowd we are
saddled with today.

They have uninterruptedly handed us the idealized
vision of rising living standards without connection to the real world
situation where U.S. imperialism is in decline and confronted with new
rivals, economic and military, in the form of the China-Russia alliance,
the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), the BRICS project, and the
Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB.) These counters don’t
weigh for Proyect, who is dreaming. What matters is the belief in
reform. We say that lasting reforms cannot be won from imperialism in
decline. Not in Britain and not in the U.S.A.

Ranked alongside Proyect’s dream are the more serious offenders, the
reformist economists who know what Marx said and wrote and still peddle a
patch-up for capitalism or a socialism arrived at by parliamentary
cleverness, legislative stealth or triangulations. We see Richard Wolff
saying the answer to capitalism’s ills are to be found in the Basque
Mondragon experiment, in ESOP (Employee Stock Ownership Programs),
worker cooperatives and smoking a lot of pot on Fridays.

Wolff idealizes the New Deal. Wolff does not tell you that the New
Deal hid behind the wall of Smoot-Hawley tariffs and sold “recovery”
until the real recovery came along with the war clouds and employment at
producing “the Arsenal of Democracy”. But what Wolff does tell you is
just as nationalist. He calls for municipalities to invoke eminent
domain against runaway employers who seek cheaper wages overseas. Lest
you think this “Marxist” is suggesting seizing the means of production, a
joke among Bernie supporters, Wolff supports burdening the tax-payers
with buying out the fleeing bosses with ‘fair compensation.’[2] We say thanks for nothing, Wolff.

Likewise, Professor Jack Rasmus of St. Mary’s College in Moraga, CA,
wants to sell us reformed capitalism, contending just like the New
Dealers that the cause of economic crisis is not the Law of Tendency of
the Rate of Profit to Fall (TRPTF), but insufficient consumption by the
masses. We wonder what world is responsible for such an ivory-tower
view, because all the masses we know spend everything they get and
borrow every dollar they can to try to hold the line of their living
standard at some level where they can reproduce themselves and house,
clothe and feed their offspring. The masses are consuming all they can
and should their children wish to be educated for 21st
Century employment, they have to incur colossal debt to pay for it. Therefore the underconsumptionist view embraces an idealist picture
where a $15 minimum wage will be a panacea if only it were adopted.

The Bernie crowd almost universally endorses the “Fight for $15”
campaign. We declare that a Living Wage is determined by the area
standards of the labor movement in its struggle with Capital. The
“Fight for $15” is only the latest version of the Democrat Party promise
to the ruling class to exclude many millions of U.S. workers from the
American Dream with a new, revised, sub-living minimum wage. Labor
lieutenants of Capital, like the Trumka AFL-CIO bureaucracy, endorse the
“Fight for $15” and underconsumptionism out of one side of their mouth,
even while admitting that this is a sub-living wage, they admonish
class struggle militant rank-and-filers that more is not achievable.

This last part is what makes them valuable to the ruling class. They
support the “Fight for $15” exactly to forestall or prevent a fight for
jobs for all at union wages. They lamely answer Marxist critics saying
the proof of the impossibility of delivering more in the pay envelope is
the existence of what are in fact ‘sweetheart’ contracts where union members
make less than $15 per hour. The union bureaucrats cynically pose as
the heroes of these most oppressed workers; they will get them a big
bump up to $15. When? Someday.[3]

The real record of reformism is a collapse into the Democratic Party
leaderships’ arms every four years. The real record shows the “Fight for
$15” takes no account of inflation during the years it will take to win
and gain this wage and they have been calling for $15 since 2012 (in
some places, before then.) Furthermore, the bureaucracy is urging you
with no subtlety to vote for the Democrat office-seekers who say they
will give you the $15 in 2020 or 2022!

Where union representation has
been one of the demands of this movement, this has turned into a
separate fight to no one but the reformists’ surprise, and where the
workers have won a cost-of-living allowance, this was also won after
another battle. No automatic applications of COLA’s to contracts appear
in the Democrats’ national plans and no mention of any is to be found in
the Administration’s new overtime law. We recall all the ‘Obama is our
best bet’ verbiage of bureaucrats and reformists at the January, 2009
Workers Emergency Recovery Conference, and we have to ask, “How is that
working out for you? Do you think everybody has amnesia?”

You can be sure that the bureaucrats’ idealized vision of the 1930’s
includes a big rise in dues checkoff dollars, but what this vision
absolutely excludes is the truly mass organizing drives, general strikes
and sit-down strikes and factory occupations which were the true
history of the 1930’s. The economic emancipation of the oppressed black
and brown populations is not in fact on their agenda even as they
promote black and brown “pro-labor” operatives of the Democratic Party.
These will be future minions of a new Clinton administration that
promises to be more aggressively imperialist.

Professor David Harvey gives Capital classes at New York University
and is the darling of self-styled Marxists in and around the Occupy Wall
Street movement. Professor Harvey is the sophisticates’
underconsumptionist. He uses Marx against Marx and derates the
centrality of the Law of the TRPTF from Marx’s explanation of capitalist
crises in Volume III of Capital. Harvey doesn’t care if you become a
Marxist, he says. He just wants you to know what Marx wrote (i.e.,
according to him.) The Law of the TRPTF has a fundamental existence
irrespective of these self-styled opponents of Wall Street and in fact
was the cause of the rise of the hedge funds that were the mechanism the
capitalist bourgeoisie used to tank the U.S. and world economy for
private profit in 2008. Profit we may add from looting banks that were
deemed by them and their political operatives to be “too big to fail.”
This put the public and in particular the tax-paying working people on
the hook for debts upwards of $60 trillion.

To expect lasting reforms
that ameliorate the living conditions of the working class or even of
Proyect’s beloved “middle class” from the political institutions who
legalized this staggering robbery is certifiable self-delusion. But
that is the hope-for-the-best mantra of Bernie-ism which does nothing to
acknowledge, never mind resist the slide toward inter-imperialist world
war. Inter-imperialist world war and not consumer spending is the
capitalists’ last resort for restoring the rate of profit. World wars
destroy capital, solving for a time the problem of non-productive
capital, both fixed and variable, which is to say destruction of
factories and people. We should point out that inter-imperialist world
war and the permanent arms economy were the signature events of the
heyday they are pining for.

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red rave is the loud mouth of members of the Communist Workers' Group of Aotearoa/New Zealand, committed to building a new communist international to lead workers to the revolutionary overthrow of global capitalism. Since 2010 we have been in a Liaison Committee with the Communist Workers' Group (USA), the Revolutionary Workers' Group (Zimbabwe) and the Revolutionary Workers' Group (Brazil).